The Blue Cross Story

出典: くみこみックス

2012年6月27日 (水) 02:16の版

The Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association is the largest private health insurance program in the United States (which includes Puerto Rico) and Canada. It is composed of 55 independent, locally operated Blue Cross and Blue Shield Plans that collectively provided wellness care coverage to more than 88 million folks in 2003.

For its beginnings we need to have to go back to 1929 to a man namedJustin Ford Kimball when he became vice president of Baylor University in Dallas, Texas. He was an knowledgeable administrator, as he headed the College of Medicine, School of Nursing, College of Dentistry, and the university hospital.

Soon following taking the job, he created a wellness program that guaranteed teachers 21 days of hospital care for 50 cents amonth. The strategy soon spread to other employee groups in Dallas, and then similar plans began to crop up nation-wide.

Meanwhile, around the very same time that Kimball was producing his program, the Blue Shield idea was becoming well-known in the lumber and mining camps of the Pacific Northwest. Significant injuries and chronic illness had been prevalent among these workers who were in quite hazardous and unsafe jobs.

Their employers saw the need to have to provide medical care for them and they arranged with physicians to pay them a monthly fee to take care of the medical requirements of the workers. These programs would later become what is recognized as the Blue Shield Plans.

As for the cross symbol, it was very nationalautoguardian.com first utilized in a 1934 advertisement for the Hospital Service Association, which later became known as Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota.

Joseph Binder, a Viennese artist, was hired by Firm secretary E.A. van Steenwyk to produce a poster that included a blue Greek cross. Van Steenwyk employed the symbol to determine his company's wellness plans and then Blue Cross began to use it in thespallc.com other parts of the country.

In 1939, the American Hospital Association, which was based in Chicago, began to use the Blue Cross symbol to indicate that well being plans about the country met particular standards.

The AHA continued to use the symbol till 1960 when the Blue Cross Association was founded. The two organizations remained affiliated till 1972.

The shield symbol was developed in Buffalo, New York by Carl plg-pllc.com Metzger in 1939 and the 1st official Blue Shield strategy was founded in California that identical year. Carl Metzger was an early pioneer in the Blue movement and he wanted a design that would distinguish the new medical service plan.

It soon flourished as the number of Blue Shield Plans kept on growing. In 1948 the symbol was informally adopted by nine plans referred to as the Connected Medical Care Program, which was later renamed the National Association of Blue Shield Plans.

Over the years, the Blue Cross and Blue Shield healthcare insurance ideas took hold. The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association was formed in 1982 by a merger of the Blue Cross Association and the National Association of Blue Shield Plans. When the Blue Cross and Blue Shield organizations merged, their brand symbols also merged and became 1 of the most familiar symbols in America.

To show you how large it has turn into, in 2003, the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association took in $182.7 billion in revenue. The evolution of managed wellness care in the United States is intimately linked to the styles of Blue Cross-Blue Shield.